11-14-09

five dream parts

1

We know bees who
burst forth
from an eviscerated ox dermis
don’t we? We
learned it
in a book
and in a dream
of healing. It isn’t
the ox that gets healed.
It is the mind.

Oh the mind’s ox lies slaughtered
and the blood runs free.

The doctor called me doctor
and spoke in doctor code
about the ailment that she noticed
under the epidermis
of my shoulder.
How gently’d be
my demise.

She wore a white chemise
and I liked her.


2

It was a ruse
and I knew it.
I’d tell her
later
at our as-
signation down
the hill.
This is a dream
I’d say. When I wake
the white bees crawling
’neath the dermis of my shoulder
will not be there. But we never
arrived at the hill and in the dream
I never wakened.


3

Paintings
easily miming
famous archetypes—
this one’s a Cezanne.
The painter
threw it together
with a few apt dabs
catching just the right
posture of the slanting shoulder shapes.

Later we were all walking
credibly
down a hill in the neighborhood.
The doctor would be in.
Perhaps I’d call her.


4

I can’t focus properly
on the fourth part.
We were talking
about old girl friends, old lovers,
and the power
congealed
in their names.

One of them asked me to name them and I
rattled off a few rather casually.


5

Awake,
it’s winter
and the bees
are congealed
in gold clumps,
nowhere to be taunted
from the hive
and no longer fear
the white disease.